13a/14a hack = closed circuit?

[James Sentman]

On Apr 21, 2005, at 7:39 AM, Steve Hume wrote:

> James, How are you dealing with the 16 unit limit on security sensors?
>

16 unit limit is something built into the firmware of the security base 
stations that X10 sells and not something that we need to worry about. 
I have (let me count...) 23 (all bought on various 3 or 4 for 1 
specials! what a deal!) of them online right now and a few more yet to 
go in places. They are working fine.

At some point you will reach a point where it starts to cause trouble 
though. The battery check messages come fairly frequent on my system 
now and as I add more there is a chance for them to bump into and wipe 
out real signals. I also have a lot of motion sensors and they could 
walk over the battery checks and get lost too. So far I haven't seen 
this as a problem though.

They get their address by measuring the time you hold the button down 
during the initial setup after putting the batteries in, and I am so 
used to programming motion sensors that I always hold it almost the 
same amount of time (even though it's not necessary for you to hold it 
that long) and the last 1 I installed I had to do the startup sequence 
3 times and kept getting an already used address! It took me a moment 
to realize that I had used all the addresses around that same interval 
and had to hold it for a shorter time to get a free address.

-James